January 2024
Can morality be inherent? The moral intuitionist Samuel Clark argues in A discourse concerning the unchangeable obligations of natural religion that there are certain moral truths that people only deny if they are stupid or purposely conniving to deny these inherent, innate truths. However, rebuttals to Clark’s supposedly obvious argument surely exist. One of these rebuttals comes from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong who provides a series of counter arguments against moral intuitionism through his writing in Moral Intuitionism Meets Empirical Psychology. This brief essay will examine one of Sinnott-Armstrong’s arguments against moral intuitionism as well as a potential moral intuitionist response.
Sinnott-Armstrong's argument against moral intuitionism that I will address here stems from the principle of disagreement. The argument is fairly straightforward: how can intuitionists suggest that people share an inherent moral intuition when there are clear cases of moral disagreement among people? If morality truly was something inherent, would there not be total agreement among all people? To further elucidate his point, Sinnott-Armstrong discusses a study done with undergraduates at Dartmouth College involving the moral dilemma of the trolley car. This thought experiment poses the scenario of a trolley car speeding down the train tracks with five people tied down to the tracks in the path of the trolley. On the other side of the fork in the path, one person is tied to the tracks. Should one pull a lever to divert the trolley car and kill the one person instead of the five, or should one let the trolley car continue down the path it was already headed and kill five people? What is moral here? This dilemma elicits constant disagreement, and it is no different for the selected students in the Dartmouth study, who were also divided on what was moral to do. So, Sinnott-Armstrong argues, if it is possible that all these people disagree, how can one say that there is an inherent moral intuition that all people share?
I find Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument convincing; however, I would like to pose a counter on the part of the moral intuitionist: could one not push back on Sinnott-Armstrong's argument here and counter that Sinnott-Armstrong's discussed Dartmouth study shows not that people do not agree on certain moral truth but rather the means of achieving those moral truths? The intuitionist could retort that the only reason there is debate around the moral action to take in the trolley dilemma is that people share a certain inherent morality, and the debate is not about that morality but rather how to achieve it. There are inherent principles that all people in the study are considering–if there were no underlying moral intuitions undergirding this debate, there would be no debate at all. Therefore, maybe there is an inherent moral sensibility in all people. Now whether this moral sensibility is more influenced by nurture than nature can be debated further, and that could alter the viability of the intuitionist argument, but I find it to be an interesting debate nonetheless.